Libros

Resumen

Do victims of crime increase or decrease participation in social groups? Despite being an interesting question, the literature on this issue is almost non-existent (Bateson, 2012). Our results, based on the Chilean victimization survey, show that victims of crime are 7% more likely to participate in social groups than non victims. Moreover, participation is higher in companionship than instrumental groups and for victims of property crimes. This is consis-tent with the predictions of the stress-bu er hypothesis (Cohen and Wills, 1985). Finally, sensitivity analysis reveals that the use of victimization surveys is more robust than opinion polls to the presence of unobservables.

Resumen

The incidence of twins has been used to identify the impact of changes in fertility on measures of investment  in children born prior to the twins, and the emerging consensus in this literature is that there is no evidence of a quantity-quality trade-off. We argue that the standard approach is flawed. Even if twin conception is random, bringing twins to term is a function of maternal health which is difficult to fully observe and which tends to be correlated with child quality, rendering the instrument invalid. The neglect of this fact in the existing literature will tend to lead to under-estimation of the quantity-quality (Q–Q) trade-off and so could contribute to explaining the negative results in the literature. Our contention that women who produce twin births are positively selected is demonstrated using data from richer and poorer countries. Using large samples of microdata from developing countries and from the USA which include indicators of maternal characteristics including health, we show that a significant trade-off emerges upon correcting for these biases. We show that this result is likely to be only a lower bound of the true Q–Q trade-off and discuss how to estimate the size of these bounds. These results have important implications for twin studies in all contexts examined here.

Resumen

We present a simple model that can explain the Ellsberg paradox by  relying on complexity aversion preferences, rather than on belief formation or ambiguity aversion. We test our theory using laboratory experiments where subjects choose among lotteries that "range" from a simple risky lottery, through risky but more complex lotteries, to one similar to Ellsberg's ambiguity urn. Our model produces predictions in contrast, at least in flavor, to those generated by typical models of ambiguity. Since the results provide support to the notion of complexity aversion, we suggest that complexity aversion may be a complementary principle behind the failure to reduce compound lotteries and the non-neutral ambiguity attitudes frequently observed in experiments.

Resumen:

The recent increase in trade liberalization has had substantial distributional consequences, although the direction of the relationship and the mechanism driving it has been open to debate. This paper analyzes the impact of tariff reductions on the dynamics of wealth and income inequality in a growing economy in which agents accumulate both physical capital and international bonds. Our study, which comprises a combination of formal analysis, supplemented with numerical simulations, suggests that in the long run the tariff reduction will be expansionary and be associated with both a permanent reduction in wealth inequality but an increase in income inequality, the magnitudes of which depend upon the speed with which the tariff reduction is implemented. For plausible parameterization of the model our numerical simulations seem to be generally consistent with empirical evidence.